ATEOTT 10 Transcript EPISODE 10
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ATEOTT 10 Transcript EPISODE 10 [0:00:04.2] JK: It was the most grassroots thing you could possibly imagine. I was there at the freaking 7-Eleven putting up posters, they get ripped down. Go back the next day, put them up. I was on the radio station every morning at 8 a.m. I mean, this is KTKE, which is where the radio was in the back of a barbecue joint. I was there trying to explain, yeah, yoga, music, nature. I got at least that simple. Yoga, music, nature. You get that? People are like, “Huh? What? Yoga and music and nature? I don’t get it.” I did that for 50 days or something. Then the night Michael Franti, who was our headliner, and the night before his headlining show, first year of festival, burst his appendix. [INTRO] [0:01:02.4] LW: Hey, friends. Welcome back to the At The End Of The Tunnel Podcast. In this episode, you’re going to hear from someone who began his journey in the music industry. Through an unlikely series of events, one being having an office just a few blocks away from the former World Trade Center in New York in September of 2001, that experience led him to become one of the first to bridge the gap between yoga, wellness and music. His name is Jeff Krasno. You may have heard of the worldwide movement that he started many years ago called Wanderlust. Well, Jeff is going to take us through that journey as well as how it evolved into his more recent movement, which is called One Commune. Just a heads up, our interview is just a little bit longer than usual, because Jeff is such an amazing storyteller. As I was listening to his story, I found it to be such a relevant example of how pretty much all of the so-called random events that we experience in life, stuff like getting bullied as a child, to being a pothead as a young adult, to making and selling homemade guacamole at random bluegrass festivals. These kinds of moments when we look at them in hindsight are almost always contributing something along our path that we're going to eventually use later on to be of service in some unexpected way. Jeff's story just kept going to all of these remarkable © 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 1 ATEOTT 10 Transcript places that ended up circling back around to the founding of Wanderlust. I wanted you to experience all of it in context. Without further ado, I'm excited to introduce you to the venerable, Mr. Jeff Krasno. [INTERVIEW] [0:02:51.6] LW: Jeff, thank you so much for joining us. As always, I'd like to start these conversations by talking about childhood. The question that we'll kick it off with is can you recall what your favorite toy or activity was as a child? [0:03:15.5] JK: Well, I was super into Batman. I was living overseas most of my childhood. When I was in Brazil, I think it was Bachiman. Yeah, I would dress up as Batman. I've one younger brother, he wasn't born yet at that point, so it was just me and my parent. We moved around a tremendous amount. We moved, I think 11 times before I was seven or eight. That was a very diverse cultural peripatetic youth all over Europe and then in South America and Brazil mostly, moving around to a bunch of different places in Rio. Yeah, that's the most coherent memory I have. Then I think that there was another cartoon character called Speed Racer. I was really into that too. My father worked for the Ford Foundation in Rio. The Ford Foundation was responsible for bringing Sesame Street to Latin America. That was one of his jobs, to bring Grover and Big Bird and Kermit and that cast of characters to South America, have those things. Originally translated into Portuguese and to Spanish, but then they became localized themselves and they were producing down there. That was a fun experience. [0:04:53.2] LW: If I could talk to little six or seven-year-old Jeff, what would he say was so appealing about Batman? Why Batman? [0:05:03.7] JK: Yeah. I mean, that's a fine question. I think that there's got to be a superpower component to it that Batman was not confined to the same rules and regulations of the normal human condition. I also think that he got to dress up in this fantastic outfit and wear a cape and wear a mask. That was the other thing, when I look back, there's a whole series of photos of © 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 2 ATEOTT 10 Transcript me as a young kid, both in Spain and in Brazil, dressed up as a torero, this matador outfit, where I had the whole outfit and the hat and the cape. I think there was a dress-up component to it that seemed pretty appealing at that. [0:06:00.5] LW: I'm sure the car didn't help – I mean, didn't hurt either, right? The Batmobile. [0:06:04.6] JK: The Batmobile. Yeah. I had a lot of those cars. That was a big thing, that whole –it was Tyco or whatever, had all of those trucks and cars. I had a lot of those. I'd like to smash them up quite a bit as I suppose a typical young boy is apt to do. [0:06:40.7] LW: Tell me a little bit about the moving around. What was that about? I know you said your dad worked for the Ford Foundation. It sounds like you were a child of the world. I know you speak French now. I don't know if that's something you learned back in those days. Or what was your childhood like in terms of your family dynamic and whatever that was causing you guys to move around? [0:07:00.1] JK: Yeah. The French, I actually learned later in life when Schuyler and I, we moved to Paris mid-college. Certainly, the neuroplasticity, I think had – or the rivers in my brain that I think made me fairly adept at picking up languages was developed when I was a kid. My dad was a Fulbright professor, so he was essentially getting grant to teach psychology first at the University of London and then in Spain. We moved to a little town called Santiago de Compostela which is a beautiful old town. Just I guess to rewind, I was born in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day at the Lying-in Hospital, which was at the University of Chicago. [0:07:54.8] LW: That's where I was born. [0:07:56.6] JK: No, really? [0:07:57.6] LW: Yeah. Yeah. Three years later. [0:08:01.1] JK: That’s hilarious. Yeah, my parents grew up in Chicago, just outside of Chicago. They both went to Evanston Township High School and were high school sweethearts. They got married really young, as was the custom back in that day. They were finishing at Stanford, © 2020 At the End of the Tunnel 3 ATEOTT 10 Transcript so then we moved to Palo Alto and then we moved overseas. My dad was teaching, got the Fulbright grant to go to University of London. We actually moved up to the Lake District in northern England, which was very, very rural. We rented this kooky amazing property that was property of the queen. I think everything up there in some way was property of the queen. It was bucolic in the sense of the reality was go outside and pick blackberries and come in and make jam. I was really into cement mixers and working around the property. There's a ton of photos of me like, every photo of me has a shovel. I was just love the shovel. I had a little tiny miniature horse called Maybe. Just because I couldn't name it. People were throwing different suggestions to me and my response was always, “Maybe.” It just became Maybe. Then yeah, moving to Spain and then Brazil. It was wonderful from the standpoint of opening me up as a child to other cultures, certainly other languages. [0:09:48.5] LW: You were fluent in Spanish and fluent in Portuguese? [0:09:51.5] JK: Yeah. I at a really pretty young age. Part of it is certainly, the supple, absorbent mind of a young person tends to soak in language quickly. I think that there was another piece of foot, which is that as a kid, I just wanted to fit in. That was the difficult part is that we were bouncing from location to location. I'd have to quickly sponge in fluency around a new language, start a new school and then six months later, would be in another place. [0:10:34.0] LW: Do you remember finding that exciting? Or do you feel that was a hassle and you didn't look forward to it as a kid? [0:10:40.7] JK: Well, it was I suppose exciting, although I didn't really know any better at that juncture. I think that was what I just thought life was about. You just tagged along with your parents. I was also a chubby kid, significantly chubby.